Citizenship British Children Lionel Giles Education Charterhouse School | Parents John Allen Giles Name Herbert Giles Fields History, Sinology | |
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Born 8 December 1845
Oxford, England ( 1845-12-08 ) Died February 13, 1935, Cambridge Books China and the Chinese, A History of Chinese Literature, The Civilization of China, Religions of ancient China, Chinese Sketches | ||
Herbert giles the ancient chinese faith 1905
Herbert Allen Giles (8 December 1845 – 13 February 1935) was a British diplomat and sinologist who was the professor of Chinese at Cambridge University for 35 years. Giles was educated at Charterhouse School before becoming a British diplomat in China. He modified a Mandarin Chinese romanisation system established by Thomas Wade, resulting in the widely known Wade–Giles Chinese romanisation system. Among his many works were translations of the Analects of Confucius, the Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), the Chuang Tzu, and, in 1892, the widely published A Chinese-English Dictionary.
Contents
- Herbert giles the ancient chinese faith 1905
- Biography
- Legacy
- Diplomatic postings
- Awards
- Written works
- Translations
- References
Biography
Herbert A. Giles was the fourth son of John Allen Giles (1808–1884), an Anglican clergyman. After studying at Charterhouse, Herbert became a British diplomat to Qing China, serving from 1867 to 1892. He also spent several years (1885–1888) at Fort Santo Domingo in Tamsui, northern Taiwan. He was the father of Bertram, Valentine, Lancelot, Edith, Mable, and Lionel Giles. In 1897 Herbert Giles became only the second professor of Chinese language appointed at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Thomas Wade. At the time of his appointment, there were no other sinologists at Cambridge. Giles was therefore free to spend most of his time among the ancient Chinese texts earlier donated by Wade, publishing what he chose to translate from his eclectic reading in Chinese literature.
His later works include a history of the Chinese Pictorial Art in 1905 and his 1914 Hibbert Lectures on Confucianism which was published in 1915 by Williams and Norgate (de). He dedicated the third edition of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1916) to his seven grandchildren, but at the end of his life was on speaking terms with only one of his surviving children. An ardent agnostic, he was also an enthusiastic freemason. He never became a Fellow at one of the constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge, despite being a university professor for 35 years. He finally retired in 1932, and died in his ninetieth year.
Legacy
Giles received the Prix Julien award from the French Academy in 1897 for his Chinese Biographical Dictionary. Generally considered unreliable among modern academics, Endymion Wilkinson described it as:
full of inaccuracies and the selection leaves much to be desired. Between one third and a half of the dates are wrong because Giles supposed that if somebody is recorded as having died in 1200 aged 63 he or she must have been born in 1137 (in most cases 1138 would have been a better guess).
He also ran afoul of the Chinese scholar Gu Hongming, who declared
Dr. Giles' Chinese biographical dictionary, it must be admitted, is a work of immense labour. But here again Dr. Giles shows an utter lack of the most ordinary judgment. In such a work, one would expect to find notices only of really notable men.
Nor did Gu appreciate Giles' great Chinese-English Dictionary describing it as
... in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method," and "decidedly of less value than even the old dictionary of Dr. Williams."
Diplomatic postings
Awards
List of awards and honours: